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Hello folks:
Situation: Plenty of portable NTFS drives, occasionally hooked to debian. The drive's light stays on [indicating use] even when dismounted (but still connected via USB).
I'd like to try and find out what's using the drive. I don't like the idea of just yanking the cable... I can not afford to trash data. I found iotop below (a top for processes creating I/O).
a. Has anyone used iotop? thoughts? (I did -- it's CLI-based. I was underwhelmed. Hard-ish to use;
can't easily pinpoint processes accessing the drives)
b. Can anyone recommend a different tool?
Thanks!
My info was found here:
https://www.hecticgeek.com/2015/01/ext4-external-hard-disk-busy-at-idle-fix/
"My Newly Formatted (‘Ext4’) External Hard Disk is Busy, Even at Idle [Fix]I recently purchased a Western Digital My Passport Ultra (1TB, USB 3.0) external hard disk as I was running out of space to save my files. Although I dual-boot a GNU/Linux distribution (which is the awesome Fedora 21 nowadays) with Windows 8.1, and almost all of my friends rely on the Windows operating system, I took the decision to format it into ‘Ext4’ anyway, despite having the obvious drawback to which I am bound (that would be sharing data of course ). To be honest, I never had used a native GNU/Linux file system on a large USB hard disk before, thus, after creating an ‘Ext4’ file system on the 1TB USB drive, I made an interesting (and irritating) observation. What happened was that, after formatting the drive into ‘Ext4’, whenever I mounted the USB disk, even when I was not using it, the LED starts to indicate (by blinking) a mild disk activity. I ignored it the first time, but every time I mounted the drive, it happened again and again. And on all these instances the LED kept blinking non-stop for minutes and the only way stop it was to detach the USB disk from the computer. So in an attempt to isolate its cause, I used the ‘iotop‘ utility (it’s a tool that sorts & lists processes by their disk I/O consumption). And as soon as I opened it, ‘iotop’ listed a process called ‘ext4lazyinit’ that was consuming a mild I/O bandwidth (about 11-13 Mb/s) out of my WD USB hard disk." |